Blue Mountains News

FlamencoVero – Performing at Baroque Room at The Carrington Hotel

Katoomba resident Veronica Gillmer, creator of dance group, FlamencoVero is staging an exciting evening of dance and music at the Baroque Room at the Carrington Hotel on 14 September, 2019.

Some of the performance will be in the style of a “cuadro flamenco”, popular in Spain where singers and dancers are free to improvise.

The show will also feature Elena Lorenzo Varga who has weaved her magic on many stages here and in Spain. Accompanying the dancers will be performances by stellar flamenco guitarists Robbie Varga and Bernie White, flautist Alegria Tomás, bass guitar Michael Walton and percussionist Peter Kennard.

During her 12 years in Spain, Gillmer worked alongside flamenco’s legendary artists, a claim shared by very few of her local peers. She danced the flamenco solo in Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker Suite and choreographed for the stage version of Strictly Ballroom for Baz Luhrmann. She has also collaborated in the Australian Opera’s Carmen and La Traviata.

“Elena Varga hurls herself passionately into choreography of her own making, using her body adventurously in ways that push the conventions of flamenco and fire up the audience.”
– Jill Sykes, SMH

“The subtlety of her stillness, broken only by beautifully expressive hands, eventually builds to a dance that is big, bold and dramatic in style, yet still precise in the arrestingly crisp timing and finish to every phrase.”– Jill Sykes, SMH.

“Veronica is a rare dancer, one of the very few I could watch forever. She has a compelling dramatic presence and performs with an ever-present tension.”
– Mary Emery, The Australian.

“… the sublime voice of Rafael Alcolea. Here, truly, is the soul of flamenco music, the gut-wrenching, lone voice of Alcolea reaching so deep into the emotions so effortlessly that there could not have been a soul in the audience who was not profoundly moved.”
– Michael Smith, Drum Media